25 Jun 2007 0014H

Reviews: Smoque, Pierre’s Bakery, Uncle Bub’s, Katy’s Dumpling House, Zagats’ New York Times piece

E, J, and I (or J, E, and I, as you like) finally drove up to Smoque (3800 N Pulaski Rd, Chicago) to check out the rumours of exceptional BBQ. The rumours are largely true. Sliced brisket is moist, tender, thick cut, and holds together. St Louis and baby back ribs were well executed and had a little tug to them, weren’t entirely fall off the bone. The smokiness of the meats was perfect. At the risk of offending an entire nation, I dare say it’s a level better than almost all of the BBQ that I’ve had in Kansas City. In fact, I used the tomato-based sauces that came with — one of which was a thicker sauce, another was a thinner, vinegary sauce — only sparingly, and mostly as a condiment for the fries. The menu is very limited, but tightly focused. What they do, they do well. If you get enough people together and order family style, you can spend about $10 a person and be pretty darn full: there is just enough food, which can’t usually be said about BBQ, seems to always be a too-much kinda food. For afters, there’s a hot peach cobbler which was fresh-tasting and a good finish, even if they were cling peaches that came out of a can, but it’s nothing special. The real killer finish was among the fresh sorbets and gelati at Pierre’s Bakery (2747 N Milwaukee, Chicago). A fine assortment of 16 non-quiescently frozen cream and fruit-based confections, such as tres leches, papaya, a strong coffee-flavoured mocha, and a strawberry sorbet that tasted so fresh the berries must have been picked and macerated that morning. The help, it must be said, was not in any hurry to help, but perhaps this was owing to the late hour, mere 20 minutes before closing.

In stark contrast, while I was out in Westmont running an errand, Uncle Bub’s (132 S Cass Ave, Westmont) turned out to have a ginormous menu and only mediocre quality. The only standout was the hot link, redolent with rosemary and sage, a bit mealy in texture; the rest was not worthy of comment. I thought I might also mention Katy’s Dumpling House (665 N Cass Ave, Westmont), the Westmont branch location of Old Second Brother Zhao’s restaurants from Changli in the province of Hebei, China, famous for their jiaozi, pork and chive stuffed dumplings. The jiaozi are tasty and juicy, yes, but the noodles are what draw me in. There is a painful sounding lajiao chaomien, 辣椒炒麵, chilli chow mein, which is not painful at all but delightfully spicy, bringing together shrimp, crab stick, and thin slices of chicken with the delicious handmade noodles. There is also the unique rousi chaobing, 肉絲炒餅, which defies easy translation to English. It’s literally “meat threads with fried cake,” the cake in this case meaning a northern Chinese flat bread cut into noodle-like strips and fried with julienned strips of pork (the meat “threads”) and veggies.

Speaking of authentic Chinese food, I’ve lost what few grains of respect I had left for the Zagats when they published their op-ed piece in the New York Times last week, claiming that they had found authentic Chinese food in China. Duh. Tell me, what do you call Chinese food in China? Perhaps for an encore they will proceed to France and say that they’ve discovered authentic French food there too, and that our McDonald’s french fries are shameless imposters of what they have in France?

My beef with them, however, is not this enthusiastic latter-day discovery of Chinese food in China, but claiming Chinese food in the States to be somehow not authentic. Did anyone bother to fact check or edit that article? Have they actually ever eaten Chinese food?

In particular, they take aim at Cantonese food, but have badly mistaken the Americanized, accommodationist Cantonese-influenced food, which we call chop suey, shorthand for food historically produced for and consumed primarily by non-Chinese, as somehow representative of the whole of Cantonese or even all Chinese cooking. In their haste to declare chop suey as unauthentic, they’ve also thus tarred the entire Chinese restaurant industry in North America as ersatz.

This is a fundamental error. One would not, for instance, mistake African American cooking as representative of the whole culinary corpus of Africa, but people seem to often assume this for Chinese Americans, as if they were some kind of “eternal foreigner.”

What the Zagats have done, in fact, is reject a quintessentially American ethnic cuisine innovation, like Shrimp DeJonghe, saganaki, and Chicken Vesuvio, all of which are predated by chop suey. It is true that chop suey is, as I will be quoted as saying on a local PBS special to be aired in late November, the greatest practical joke in all of culinary history. It is true it is not a traditional Cantonese or Toisaanese food, insofar as there is no dish called jaap sui we would serve at a native table, which would only invite howls of derisive laughter. It is, as the Cantonese name implies, mixed-up bits and pieces: it is this and that.

But in Exclusion-era America, it became what the predominantly non-Chinese American culinary market would bear. For a practical joke, it was wildly successful for a remarkably long time, but is hardly indicative of what I would call contemporary Chinese cuisine. If anything it is a dying American ethno-regional cuisine, having been subsumed by maturing palates, the attrition of its guardians and its primary audiences, replaced by broader, more diverse and sophisticated cuisines introduced by new immigrants.

Then, too, we should talk about authenticity. Authenticity is not a value inherent to a thing as such, but a social and political value, imbued by market forces, assigned to something or someone. Arguments about authenticity are oftentimes really about who has the power, or authority, to assign a value to something or someone. To say that this is not authentic, that is, of no value, is to also call into question Chinese food as eaten in Japan, which is quite Japanese, and Chinese food as eaten in Korea, which is quite Korean (and both of which are readily available in the US) — need we go into Chinese food as eaten in Hawaii, Mexico, Peru, Cuba, Europe, Africa? To say nothing about other American ethno-regional cuisines here.

It is equivalent to saying that American cuisine, having had no native or original source but its own, informed by its many immigrant cultures, is inauthentic.

But all such regional cuisines are authentic cuisines with their own techniques, sources, influences, and history. And insofar as they are eaten widely by the population, in almost all cases anyway, their authenticity is a point lost upon say, the Latino family who I once saw ask for nothing else but 6 orders of 椒鹽中蝦 — one full plate of medium-sized prawns on the shell for each member of the family — or the teens in New York who order four wings and a pork fried rice and then say, murder the delivery man for good measure.

So there are many things wrong about that article, apart from their own lack of authority to make their claim, which is painfully shortsighted at best and badly misinformed, since some of the finest Chinese cookery in the world can be found not in China, but within Chinese communities located throughout the US, Canada, Australia. Apparently, the Zagats don’t “eat their own dog food.” But this is the kind of typical insular nonsense that I’ve come to expect from non-Chinese speaking about things Chinese. Actually it’s the kind of insular nonsense I also come to expect from Chinese too, but experience tells me it’s more likely to come from the “outsiders.” :-P

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